Academic institutions and other higher education and training bodies worldwide are producing a wide range of educational content that is made available to other educational actors and students as Open Educational Resources (OER) that can be freely shared and re-used. Edx, Coursera, OER Commons, Connexions, the Khan Academy are only a few examples of the diverse actors proposing open content in various formats (from Massive Open Online Courses to university videolectures, to training webinars, etc.). The CommonS partners are part of this OER revolution, but believe that some issues need addressing: • the difficulty to share and reuse open resource "knowledge chunks" due to language barriers • the difficulty to find and retrieve educational content, especially for lifelong learning purposes • the need to adapt such "knowledge chunks" from a cultural point of view (localisation) • the lack of adequate social and collaborative features in e-learning contexts (online communities) • the lack of active involvement of participants in the online learning process The CommonS (Common Spaces for collaborative learning) project is aimed at the development of a co-learning and e-mentoring Virtual Community of Practice (VCoP) devoted to improving the employability skills and opportunities of participants and reducing the gap existing between the academic world and the labour market, by means of appropriately remixed and localised OERs. The participants (university lecturers, graduate and postgraduate students, young and senior professionals, vocational trainers) will take on different and flexible roles (mentor, mentee, tutor, supervisor) within the VCoP, in which they will collaborate in various activities, all aimed at the improvement of employability: • categorisation of available OER content (especially for foreign language, information technology and entrepreneurship skills) • reuse and remix of categorised OER content • translation and localisation of categorised and remixed OER content • participation in open courses made available through the Community Initially, a small number of participants from universities in Italy, United Kingdom and Portugal (around 150 students and 10 lecturers) will beta-test the online platform developed by the CommonS partners. A small group of senior professionals and trainers (around 20) will also take part in this initial Community. Through adequate dissemination activities, participation in CommonS will then be extended gradually to other students in universities taking part in the project and in the main three partner countries. Other participants, young and senior professionals, will be recruited thanks to professional organizations and trade unions that have expressed interest in the lifelong learning features of the project. In the third year the VCoP will also be opened to corporate stakeholders who intend to use the platform for training, placement and recruitment purposes. The expected overall community membership is expected to rise to a 800-1000 participants by the end of the project period. The main expected results are the following: • Greater availability and more exchange opportunities of OERs for European universities and lifelong learning agencies • A greater integration of employability skill OERs within European university curricula • Improved integration between online and traditional classroom teaching in higher education environments • Adoption of mentoring and e-mentoring practices aimed at improving the quality of learning, particularly for disadvantaged learners • Improved employability at a European level for post-graduates and participants in post-university lifelong learning activities • A change of attitude by university students with regard to online training activities, to be considered as opportunities to build knowledge in an active, interactive and social manner